Saving Budget & Schedule on Black Swan
Monday, February 7, 2011 at 11:17AM Black Swan - Synopsis of the December 2010 ICG Magazine Article by Pauline Rogers
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cinematographer: Matthew Libatique
The directors filmed at Purchase College in New York State on actual performance stages. This allowed them to achieve the Lincoln Center backdrop without having to work around schedule limitations and costs associated with actually filming at Lincoln Center in New York City.
They brought in Lorne (Lonnie) MacDougall, a veteran for both Broadway and film lighting to operate the house lights with local dimmer board operator Lloyd Rothchild who works for the State Theater at Purchase College. They admittedly had very little money to bring in extras and built contrast using crew to hold units in their hands. This allowed them to use practical lighting as much as possible, saving budget on equipment and grip electric personnel.
This compounded with the decision to film in Super 16MM using ARRIFLEX 416 cameras gave them an expanded depth of field. The depth of field was increasingly important because it was necessary to minimize the number of takes due to the physicality of the dancer choreography. Super 16MM offers generous latitude for keeping focus.
To save money, the Rave Club scenes were done extremely low tech. They used paparazzi strobes with magenta gels and green kinos for fill with hand held lasers pointed into the mirror balls and a few flashlights against a background made up of three walls of Mylar they shook with fans.
They used a Canon 1D Mark 4 to film the subway scene which allowed them to operate in extremely low light with anonymity using a very small crew.
Finally, in post, they chose to model Natalie Portman’s face replacement in 2D instead of 3D so the budget could be spent on the wings Portman’s character believes are growing during her final dance scene.
In the words of editor Andy Weisblum, the watchword on set was “efficiency” due to a tight budget and schedule. I think that is a good word for any set regardless of budget.